Dark Skies Festival

Dark Skies Festival Photo Competition

As part of the Dark Skies Festival 2019 we ran the Dark Skies Photo Competition, looking for the best photographs of the North York Moors and Howardian Hills AONB night skies. We received some fantastic entries and we're thrilled to announce the winner for 2019 is Eighteen97 bed and breakfast in Goathland.

Well done to the shortlisted 10 entries and a huge thank you too all who took part.

Success for the Dark Skies Festival 2019!

The North York Moors and Yorkshire Dales are a stargazer’s paradise, with some of the best night skies in the country.

In an urban area you'll be lucky to see 20 stars on a clear night, but in an area of low light pollution, such as our National Parks, you could see as many as 2,000.

For the fourth Dark Skies Festival, we teamed up with the Yorkshire Dales once again, bringing headline acts and celestial events between 15 February - 3 March 2019. To mark the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing, Dark Skies Festival 2019 focused on our lunar satellite.

This year was a great success, with over 90 events including our first Stay and Gaze packages. We received over 4,000 visitors across the 17 days enjoying all the dark sky events.

Highlights included:

Special talk at Castle Howard: Our Place in the Universe by Dr Tim O'Brien, University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics

Go Ape! Night Zip

Dining on the HM Bark Endeavour and stargazing on its deck

Dark Skies gravel biking challenge with True Grit

A multimedia, indoor planetarium pop-up experience, a 360 degree journey through the stars